Jacob Gould Schurman Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry
(Cornell) & Author of The China Study. Startling Implications for Diet,
Weight Loss and Long Term Health (Campbell TC and Campbell, TM II, 2005) T.
Colin Campbell, who was trained at Cornell
(M.S., Ph.D.) and MIT (Research Associate) in nutrition, biochemistry and
toxicology, spent 10 years on the faculty of Virginia Tech's Department of
Biochemistry and Nutrition before returning to the Division of
Nutritional Sciences at Cornell in 1975 where he presently holds his Endowed
Chair (now Emeritus). His principal scientific interests, which began with
his graduate training in the late 1950's, has been on the effects of
nutritional status on long term health, particularly on the causation of
cancer. He has conducted original research both in laboratory experiments
and in largescale human studies; has received over 70 grant-years of
peerreviewed research funding (mostly NIH), has served on several grant
review panels of multiple funding agencies, has lectured extensively, and
has authored over 300 research papers.

STEVE PRUSSACK: Everyone’s on the line, welcome to Veganpalooza 2012
Vegetarian World Summit. I’m your cohost Steve Prussack, and we’re ready to
introduce our next guest. It’s T. Colin Campbell. He’s the author of the New
York Times bestseller “The China Study: Startling Implications For Diet,
Weight Loss, and Long Term Health”. This is the most comprehensive study on
human nutrition ever, and it’s just incredible if you haven’t read it. It’s
sold over 800,000 copies and sales increase. It’s in the top 100 on Amazon.
His background is extensive in teaching and he’s a professor. Let’s welcome
to the call Dr. Will Tuttle to lead us in this extraordinary interview right
now.

DR. WILL TUTTLE: Thank you, Steve, so much. Yes, we are definitely
honored to have with us Dr. T. Colin Campbell, who’s become more and more
well-known outside the ranks of professional nutritionists and so forth. His
name is in many ways becoming a household name in not only the United States
and other English-speaking countries but I think even in other countries in
the world. People are learning about his unique contribution to our
understanding of the connections between nutrition and health through his
landmark book “The China Study” which was called by the New York Times the
Grand Prix of nutritional studies. Very large-scale study in conjunction
with professors from Oxford and also from China and discovering that eating
the typical standard American diet is actually not at all in our best
interest when it comes to being healthy. So I’d like to go ahead and begin
the interview with Dr. Campbell and just begin with a question. So please,
Dr. Campbell, could you tell us in a nutshell what the basic findings of
your study are and also sort of how you came to them so that people can
understand what happened and what findings are and what the
implications of that are for us now.

DR. T. COLIN CAMPBELL: Thank you, Will, it’s a pleasure being on your
show. I think maybe the best way to explain this in a few short sentences is
to tell where I came from and where I ended up in a sense after about 50
years. I was of course raised on a dairy farm, as many people know, and was
from that kind of background. So from the personal side, I was from the
countryside and eating the typical American diet, lots of meat, milk, and
eggs and stuff like that. Then when I went away to graduate school to do my
work at Cornell University eventually, I actually did my doctorate
dissertation and early research using that same presumption, that dairy,
especially cow’s milk, was especially good largely because of its
high-quality protein, as we said in those days as well as its calcium
content. So that’s what I did for my doctoral dissertation, and that’s
actually what I was taught, and also in terms of what I was in turn teaching
my students as I started teaching classes and things too. But in those early
days I did begin to see some, if you could call them, disquieting kind of
evidence to suggest that some of this might not be true. Probably the one
thing that captured most of my attention in the beginning, in fact it did,
was the idea of what protein does or doesn’t do. Everybody seems to have had
a reverence for protein, making sure they got enough, and especially people
liked to get so-called high quality protein, which basically meant consuming
protein from animal-based foods. As a matter of fact, a lot of people in
those days thought, and unfortunately still do to these days to some extent,
they thought that protein was synonymous with meat. So they had been long
advised to consume plenty of protein, which meant meat, and those two
words kind of got mixed up with each other. Then of course there was, there
had actually been learned very many years ago that plants had protein too.
It was so-called low quality, and so that’s that whole dilemma. But in any
case, I got involved in my research over the years. I ran a pretty big
research program, lots of students, college and so forth and so on, and it
was funded actually by the National Institute of Heath, most of it at
Cornell. I learned some things as I said there that were quite different
compared to what I know now in two ways. First off, from the laboratory
eventually then to the China study that Steve mentioned in the beginning,
the whole idea of consuming an animal-based food diet, high in protein and
supposedly also having some other superior nutritional qualities, that idea
I found eventually had to be turned on its head, that the protein itself,
especially high-quality protein, animal-based protein, could do things like
increase the rate of cancer growth. It was a very strong carcinogenic
substance in that sense. That was a real shocker, especially since I was
coming from the dairy farm. So that posed a whole new series of other
questions involving other nutrients and other health problems, whether it
was heart diseases, cancer, different kind of cancer, and so forth and so
on. As I got involved in that kind of research doing a lot of the
experimental work myself, I also participating for about 20 years on expert
panels that were being developed to help develop national policy on food and
health. These panels were organized by Washington, D.C., institutions for
the most part. I was very much involved in that and so I could see the
interface, I participated at the interface between science on the one hand
and what the public gets to know on the other. It was a great lesson, a very
complex kind of thing, but in any case, all of a sudden over three years, it
just became to me my whole world that I assumed to be correct in the
beginning, both personally and professionally, was beginning to come apart.
So eventually I wrote the China study with my son, who incidentally is a
newly-minted physician, and then I’m just finishing, I just now am finishing
up a second book called “Whole” elaborating on sort of a philosophy of
science as it applies to our understanding of nutrition, which is very
confusing for most people, using this philosophy to elaborate on how do we,
how can we redefine the word nutrition, how can we practice nutrition in a
different way to take advantage of this kind of awareness that I’ve become
aware of. The philosophy for understanding nutrition better is basically,
for me, it’s at the heart of explaining for me better why is Western
medicine on the wrong track and why has it been on the wrong track for so
long. So I’m really very excited now about discussing this concept with
various and sundry audiences because I think it has so much more to offer
than the way we have done things in the past, both in terms of the way we do
research as well as the way we actually formulate policy and formulate
educational programs for nutrition. So I use the world holistic that will be
familiar to many in this audience I’m sure, but I don’t spell it holistic –
I spell it wholistic. And that’s the title of my book. I really believe
historically that the world holistic, which has for many people let’s say
sectarian overtones, religious overtones obviously, much of that kind of
thinking I believe if one checks back in history refers to the oneness of
some of our thoughts and the oneness of the soul in a sense. What I had come
to believe and see, especially in a sense working inside of cells, I know
cells are very small and we’ve got 100 trillion of them in our bodies and
all that sort of stuff, but the cell is a fascinating unit that is like a
whole universe that seems to operate almost as if a symphony, in a
symphony-like affair. It raises basic questions about who’s running the show
here and how does all that happen, and how can one then use that kind of
information, not just inside of cells but inside of bodies and between
people and in a larger context of what you have so elegantly worked on for
so long, Will, on peace in the world. I think this whole philosophy has
resonation on so many levels. That’s where I am. I just now have, I
understand the so-called reductionist science very well. I did that for
years, and there’s a place for it. But it’s looking at the parts instead of
the whole. I’m really anxious to be able to articulate what’s the difference
between the two. I think science, in fact, I challenge science, actually,
fairly serious, that science has become in a Western world and for most
people’s thinking, as really is, it’s a reductionist exercise involving
looking at minutiae and details out of context. So that causes massive
confusion to start with. It also causes some pretty tragic consequences in
terms of how health has been affected for so many people. So I’m really
anxious now to jump into this new sphere of thinking, new paradigm, and
articulate what I think I see. So in a nutshell, I know I probably rambled
on too long, but that’s it.

DR. TUTTLE: Yeah, and so you’re, yeah, I hear what you’re saying. You
feel that the traditional medical and scientific paradigm is so
reductionistic that it doesn’t see the bigger picture. With “The China
Study” you gave us this new understanding, really, in many ways, it’s really
actually an old understanding, but you gave it a new scientific boost with
this China study that animal protein, casein, which is the protein in cow’s
milk, is actually pretty hard on us, you said it was carcinogenic, actually,
and that this whole thing has been misunderstood by a reductionistic science
that doesn’t see the bigger picture. So because of that, a lot of people now
are switching to a more plant-based diet, and I guess you’re seeing a lot of
people getting a lot healthier doing that. How is the reception of your idea
been among the people in the medical community overall, would you say?

DR. CAMPBELL: Great question. Some years ago, our book has been out now
for going on eight years, and in the beginning, I was lecturing to a variety
of different kind of groups and occasionally maybe to a medical conference
or something like that. It wasn’t terribly well-received in the beginning, I
think, in the sense that it was mostly silence. I didn’t get engaged in too
much serious discussion. However, in the last couple years, the majority of
my talks now are to medical schools. I’m just seeing a sea change. It’s
exciting. It’s very fascinated because I’m fairly candid when I’m speaking
to these audiences and pointing out, for example, that they’re all good
people wanting to treat people and help people in a medical way, but they
actually never got trained in one discipline that is by far and away the
most important, and that’s nutrition. There’s not a medical school in the
country that teaches even the concept of nutrition, right or wrong. So I get
busy talking about the ability of nutrition, that is whole food plant-based
nutrition, the ability of that to not just prevent future health problems,
prevent certain diseases so forth and so on, it’s not just that, which we to
some extent have sort of accepted, but more to the point, this kind of diet
actually can be used as treatment, which is the heart and soul of the
medical practice, at least philosophically. People went into that profession
to help people and to treat people with their problems, of course, hopefully
telling them what they can do so they didn’t get problems in the future. But
what we’re now discovering, I’ve been part of this process, if you take a
group of people and provide them the food that you think they ought to be
eating, for example, the changes that occur are truly remarkable. There’s
nothing in all of Western medicine that combined can achieve what we can
achieve with food. Not even close. So it really is just so remarkable. When
people experience this kind of a fact, just everyday folk who didn’t know
they were doing anything the wrong way, and they do this both clinically and
behaviorally, sensory reception too, they just feel the changes, they know
the changes. I’m sure that you know, Will, yourself, but then to document
this in a clinical setting too really adds, I think, a lot of weight to the
idea.

DR. TUTTLE: Right, so you see people adopting a wholefoods plant-based
diet and then you see them actually in a sense that diet treats them. They
don’t, their blood pressure goes down, they can go off their medications,
their diabetes gets reversed or their cancer or all these other different
potentially whatever it is. I guess, though, what we see probably perhaps
happening is the medical industry or the institutions find this I’m sure
very interesting, very exciting, whole new vistas are opening up, but I
would think maybe it’s also on some level threatening as well to some of the
ways things are traditionally done. Is that, do you see the momentum
building, though, that the challenging traditional ways of only treating
things in a reductionistic way with toxic chemicals and drugs?

DR. CAMPBELL: Yes, as I said I myself spent about 20 years very actively
involved in policy development through the senior levels, got to know some
of those decision makers obviously. I had thought up until about two or
three years ago that with those contacts and that network I had that if I
could convince some of those people what we have here there could be some
change. I actually then came to realize that was a very naïve view. I took
my friend Dr. Esselstyn along to Washington to meet people like that, kind
of test them, put their foot in the waters and see how it would go. What was
so clear is that as individuals, these people, especially the more senior
people, very bright people, well-trained oftentimes, major responsibilities,
they could look at what we were talking about, for example, and personally
say wow. They might not know it but they looked at it and they saw that we
were for real and all that. But that was the end of it. That was only a
personal, it wasn’t a public interest. The only one that has come out and
sort of spoken out pretty loud about this, about our work, is President
Clinton, who was on the scene telling his story. He actually got our book
about three or four years ago from a mutual friend that he and I had. He’s
been brave in telling his story. But actually most of the other people have
been elected to office or their jobs, their bosses are elected officials, if
you will. So it doesn’t work from the top down. I can’t say that really
enough now. It doesn’t work from the top down. It has to work from the
bottom up. So my sons, plural, three sons actually, they’re now developing
some things particularly on leadership, one of my sons, that takes advantage
of something I have been working on for a number of years, and that is how
can you take information like this and introduce it for public consumption?
We have now some really definite ideas on that, we’re very excited about it,
and have had some experience too, at a senior level in the state government
in this particular case, really interesting. Once again getting tremendous
support, intense personal support from key people, but then watching the
whole thing crumble under the weight of the system, it you will. At the end
of the day, money talks. Money and power talks. So I’m really now, though,
confident that given the program that we now have and thinking about this
various parts, I should add it’s a rather wholistic approach, in which
doctors get paid, that’s a key thing too. Doctors have to get paid, they
have to be participants, they have to be leaders, and they can get paid.
That’s the key. So we’ve got some ideas that we’re very excited about. We
know if we would go into a town or maybe an institution, maybe a
self-employed, selfinsured company setting, that we can cause big-time
changes, and we can then provide opportunities for them to understand, too,
how they can sustain those changes and therefore cut costs and save on
health care bill. So I understand, I always thought it was important to know
the problem. Some people don’t want to work on the problem. They just want
to work on the solution, I think. But I do like to understand the problem.
It’s a tough task sometimes and it’s disenchanting and frustrating, but
without knowing the problem, we can’t figure out the solution, at least a
solution that can stand on its own legs and go forward being financial
stable and also being sustained in a health sense. It’s not a fad thing, a
here today and gone tomorrow kind of thing. It really has to be a thing that
sustains for one’s lifetime.

DR. TUTTLE: So you’re finding that people are interested, like companies,
for example, that have health insurance that they can save a lot of money if
they can teach their employees to eat a whole foods plant-based diet that
they will be able to cut their health costs dramatically, so they’re
motivated. So that’s the kind of grassroots approach you’re thinking of?

DR. CAMPBELL: Yeah, the motivation is a key thing. Education is
important. They have to know the background information. And motivation is
just being healthy, in a sense. But there are other tricks too. Let’s face
it. Our society is such that it’s not a very friendly environment for people
who don’t know how to prepare the food, who don’t know where to get it from,
who don’t know this, who don’t know that. It’s kind of hard for people to
sustain that. So we think we sorted that out, that how people can do that.
It is. It’s very exciting. I think, as I say, it’s a holistic approach, of
course, trying to take into consideration the various impediments that can
occur for people who are thinking about these things.

DR. TUTTLE: Right, and you also I know are offering your T. Colin
Campbell Foundation, I guess through Cornell University, the certificate in
plant-based nutrition, which is do you have any idea how many people have
gone through that now?

DR. CAMPBELL: I think we’re somewhere around a couple thousand at least.
We haven’t been doing it very long, but for three courses, we have three
courses. It’s done in collaboration with the company owned by Cornell
University; it’s called eCornell Incorporated. They had sort of devised a
nice plan, and so we’re doing it with them. We now are offering, and this is
soon going to change, we were approved for offering 19 Category 1 continuing
medical education credits for doctors. That’s soon going to change to 25, so
we’ve always recently revised it. Now about a third of our so-called
students are physicians, and I’m sure that’s going to climb. As I said,
we‘re getting tremendous feedback from that, and we do want to expand that
to add some more courses to it. So that’s a very unique offering. It’s not
having somebody just sit in front of a computer and listen to some lectures
and stuff like that. That’s okay, but we actually when we get a virtual
class together, I’ve got a faculty, actually, of professionals who serve as
instructors for each virtual class. It’s the interaction between the
instructor and the class of about 30 people or so. It’s that interaction
that is at the heart, I think, of why this is so successful because people
who join the group are obviously very motivated to learn, and now we’re
enriched with professionals in this operation. One of the things I have to
say that also you asked me, I’m excited about this so-called movement in
this direction. Things have been happening over the last decade or so that
are much more inspiring and encouraging than they have been in decades
before, on the one hand. On the other hand, I really want to emphasize,
however, that for this to go forward, it’s extremely important in my view to
keep this, keep the integrity of the science. Because without that, without
having that kind of basis for things and really understanding of the
science, we really, it’s very difficult to maintain the integrity. I know
that there’s a lot of people who are getting interested in this, and they
kind of, we have a lot of, well, this happens in any kind of movement.
Things go in various and sundry directions, but as long as we can sort of
really emphasize, we’ve got to have the science right. Now there needs to be
mainstream. It needs to be mainstream and not just be a community unto
itself. I know there are lots of people working toward that, and just as I
said, I guess we kind of have to keep reminding ourselves that that’s what
we’d like to do.

DR. TUTTLE: Yes, it’s always a challenge, I guess, within research in
general, I think probably especially within nutritional research, that
there’s possible to skew experiments to get the results you want, and also
to do research that’s perhaps too reductionistic . So I think what you’re
emphasizing is the idea of very highquality nutrition research that sees the
big picture but also tries to get in touch with why, how it is that eating a
whole food plant-based diet, what is the actual mechanisms and how does it
actually help us and how we can understand this. I guess, do you feel like
we still have a long way to go in understanding, or do you think that we
pretty much, in terms at least of the basic idea, that’s not going to change
the fact that eating saturated fat and cholesterol and animal protein is
detrimental and we don’t have to keep researching that anymore.

DR. CAMPBELL: No, we don’t have to worry about, I think the question you
might be asking that some people might be interested in, is it likely that
what we’re talking about, is it likely that some of this might be wrong and
maybe we’ve headed in the wrong direction? I’m going to say with a great
deal of confidence that we’re not. This is going in the right direction.
We’ll tweak it here and there to go forward with this message, but the
fundamental message is concrete. It’s been around of 2500 years, to be
honest about it, starting with Pythagoras in the ancient Greek times and
also in the other ancient traditions in the East. Some of these people knew
about it at that time. The question is more how come we haven’t heard this
before? What happened to it during all this time? So it’s not that we’re
wrong and we’re making some mistakes possibly, that we’re running some risk
of going in the wrong direction. I don’t feel that’ll happen. It’s more a
question of being able to articulate it in a form and facing the
difficulties that we have and communicating the information that we have.
There are difficulties, but just figuring out how to solve that problem and
moving forward and forcefully in a sense. It’s good science and so we’re
safe. We’re on a good, safe ship going in the right direction. Might
occasionally have to go around a reef or something, if we should hit that
from time to time, that’s okay, we’ll manage that and refine the message. I
like the way you just said it, Will. I know with your doctoral training you
probably are also in the research field yourself in your own discipline. You
do understand the importance, I think, clearly of doing things right in a
sense. And your music, that’s a wholistic experience. I use that sometimes.
It really is. It’s like somebody can’t come up to the stage and just bang
away on one instrument and one note and expect to follow a symphony. It
doesn’t work. So make a story out of it and something pretty. That’s the way
the biochemistry works out of cells, that I became aware of. It’s awesome to
realize how things, infinite numbers of things and events and so forth, can
work so well together and instantaneously, almost, in infinitely small
periods of time. It is. Each cell is an orchestra. It has its own symphonies
in its place. It’s very nice.

DR. TUTTLE: Enormously, the cells are enormously complex, and our
attempts to understand all of this, but I still think that we will probably
be having so-called science that is trying to refute this. For example, like
the West A. Price Foundation people and other institutions that perhaps have
an agenda to try to keep people somewhat confused about things so that we
can continue with business as usual. That I think perhaps, is that the
reason why having good science is so important, you think?

DR. CAMPBELL: Yeah, it sure is. I actually think it’s also useful to,
I’ve actually been involved in this a little bit. I just gave a so-called
TED lecture, if you’re familiar with that, that’s supposed to be released
this week. I did that in New York. So I’m trying to speak to that in a very
short period of time to some extent. I’ve also had an invitation to write an
op-ed piece for, I can’t give the name of the newspaper, everybody knows the
newspaper. So that’s supposed to come out in September. So I think what each
of us do, whatever we do, we have to work hard to try to write this in a
form that people, other people who have other agendas, that they can’t
refute. I think about this all the time. What kind of argument can I make
that is truthful, first of all, first and foremost it has to be truthful,
and then it has to be backed up with reasonable evidence, of course, and the
kind of argument that can’t be refuted, because I am so confident of this
message. I don’t like to talk about details very much, about this food being
better than that food, whether chicken is better than beef or beef better
than chicken. That’s kind of a crazy thing. But if we talk about it in terms
of understanding complexity, first off, and then articulating first and
foremost is this sense of complexity, but yet at the same time articulating
the message about how this complexity is integrated. I think sometimes this
kind of argument is almost irrefutable because when I talk to people who
might want to disagree with me, I don’t find them challenging that idea
really that much. They might want to not do it because of all the interests
they have, especially money interests, but they can’t refute the argument, I
think.

DR. TUTTLE: Right. Great, well, it’s really been very, very helpful to
hear your perspective on this, and I think everyone at Veganpalooza’s going
to find this information helpful. I think it’s probably about time for us to
kind of wrap this up. Do you have any final thoughts? I guess you’ve pretty
well said.

DR. CAMPBELL: Thanks, Will, Thanks, Steve. Thanks to you, you’ve asked
the most important questions I think, and I’ve always been a great admirer
on what you do in your life, and there’s a lot of synergy between what
you’re doing and sort of the basically laboratory too. That’s kind of
interesting.

DR. TUTTLE: All right. Well, thanks so much, and I guess I’ll turn it
over to Steve. You have anything you want to add, Steve, before we close?

STEVE: Well, again, thank you Dr. Tuttle and T. Colin Campbell. We want
to thank our guest T. Colin Campbell for being here on this session of
Veganpalooza 2012 Vegetarian World Summit.

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